


Grit

by EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12



Series: January: 31 Days Challenge [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Blood, Dead Clone Characters, Episode: s02e05 Landing at Point Rain, Injuries that Probably Should Have Happened in Canon, M/M, Major Character Injury, Obi-Wan Kenobi Whump, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, or perhaps not, potentially
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:26:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28572984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12/pseuds/EwanMcGregorIsMyHomeboy12
Summary: When their ship is shot down on Geonosis, Cody wakes up alone.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & Obi-Wan Kenobi, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Series: January: 31 Days Challenge [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2089257
Comments: 8
Kudos: 130





	Grit

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for the later post! A03 was down last night :( 
> 
> As always, hope you all enjoy! Please R and R, let me know what you think! :D
> 
> Find me on tumblr at this same name :)

When Cody opens his eyes, his helmet is gone. His teeth and tongue are covered in a thick layer of dry grit that closing his mouth does nothing to dampen. It tastes like blood, or at least the metallic tang of it, and as he isn’t sure of the source, whether internal or external or elsewhere. The light filtering in through the remains of the landing craft is both far too bright and so dim that he can hardly see: It takes a moment of looking at it before he realizes that the reason for the red sand in his mouth and the unpleasant brightness is that his helmet is missing.

Not feeling any major protests, he sits up slowly. The back of his head throbs in slight protest, but nothing major seems broken. He blinks. And blinks again. And a third time as he realizes that the soldier who is sitting across from him, helmet still intact, seemingly looking directly at him, is dead. He looks around; there are more bodies scattered around in varying states of mangled. Cody couldn’t see any injury on the clone in front of him, but the unnatural stillness in the way he sat, fastened at the waist by his safety belt, told Cody enough.

Was he the only one still alive? He could hear no one else moving, hear no scrabbling of armor against the metal casing of the ship, or breathing-no matter how ragged. Only quiet and the faint roaring of a distant battle that they had been due to arrive at. He wondered how long it had been, if the other battalions had noticed their absence yet. If their rendezvous time had even passed or if he had only been unconscious for seconds instead of the long hours it felt like. 

He moved to stand, propping himself on his arm. Cody jerked his hand away from the floor as soon as it touched it, the feeling of hot, sticky warmth on his fingers through the breaks in his gloves. He lifted his hand to his face, seeing now the blood that ran down onto his arm braces, cutting through the dust that had settled there with a thin, red line.

For a moment, he thought it was his, that the throbbing in his head had been more than he had realized until he saw that the red pool he had put his hand in was still spreading. Slowly, slightly, as if running from an extremely slow faucet. The very edge of it, now mottled with Cody’s handprint, contorted into an odd shape where the far side seeped into the edge of a light brown tunic. The General. His General. Obi-Wan.

In the chaos, Cody had forgotten that Obi-Wan had been on board with them. That he had been the one who started the issue of the emergency call when they came under heavy fire. That he would have inevitably have tried to keep them all safe as the ship went down. Had he kept Cody safe? What about the others? What about himself? Cody scrambled now, panic overriding every other sense. Was this the blood he had breathed in? Not his own. Never his own. But instead, Obi-Wan’s?

He still couldn’t see well, and the throbbing in his head only worsened as he moved quickly up to Obi-Wan’s side where he lay still, so still, against the cold metal flooring. “General Kenobi?” There was no answer from the man on the floor. No twitch of acknowledgement. No sign that he could hear Cody at all. “Sir?”

The source of the blood was easy enough to find. It was a jagged piece of shrapnel, lodged in the General’s upper thigh that was soaked through with blood and slick against his fingers as Cody tried to test the severity of the wound. The only comfort he could take at the moment was the blood still pulsing gently through the tear in Obi-Wan’s leggings. Dead men had no pulse, dead men didn’t bleed like that.

He checked him over for other wounds, but found none other than a blood-spattered spot on his temple, though not one that Cody thought was capable of felling a Jedi. He must have lost consciousness from the blood loss then. Cody wondered how long that had taken, if the General had laid there waiting on someone, anyone to wake up or to show up. It occurred to him in that moment that he had never seen Obi-Wan truly injured. Grazed slightly, perhaps. Exhausted, certainly. But never injured like this, like a soldier might be. Like any of the men might be. The thought made him swallow, the overwhelming reminder that Obi-Wan might die hitting him harder than whatever it was that had caused such a bump on the back of his head.

“I’ll be right back,” He said to Obi-Wan’s unmoving face. There was no reaction, and though Cody didn’t expect one, he couldn’t help but let the panic set in just a bit further.

He scrambled to his feet again, smearing blood over the floor, and climbed over Obi-Wan. Now his body groaned in protest at the sudden movements. Even if he wasn’t injured, he would certainly be sore in the days to come, if from nothing but the impact of the crash. He moved from body to body, corpse to corpse inside the small space, looking for a still working commlink. Most were smashed to bits or the screens so cracked that they blurred and blipped bright green when he tried to use them. After some effort, and rifling over the bodies of nearly fifteen dead soldiers, he made it to the jammed door of the cockpit. It protested against his trying to move it, the metal groaning under his hands. He pushed harder, feeling his own pulse straining, highlighting the creeping pain, and the door gave way in a crooked jerk. 

The pilot was dead too, the glass cover of the cockpit missing most of the front panel and a large bullet hole blown through both the front and back of their helmet. But their commlink was working, still clipped to their utility belt and secured from the crash where they had been buckled into the seat.

Cody turned it on, trying and trying to remember one of the friendly signals. Who were the other commanders? Mundi. Unduli. Skywalker. Skywalker! Even as his head was starting to radiate pain down to the rest of his body, Cody could remember Skywalker’s comm code; he had typed it in seemingly hundreds of times over the course of the past several years and his fingers worked more from muscle memory than his brain did. The comm buzzed, the signal interrupted intermittently as he waited on a response and made his way back to where Obi-Wan lay.

“Skywalker,” A wavery signal came through on the commlink, a series of explosions and loud crackling punctuating the General's response. 

“General Skywalker, sir, its Commander Cody,” He spoke as quickly as he could, feeling as through he were yelling in the otherwise silent space, “Our ship was shot down. General Kenobi is badly injured.”

“Cody?” Came the voice again, as though the Jedi were trying to speak to Cody through a straw.

“Please, Sir, I’m sending coordinates.” He hit the transmitter button on the commlink and though he could hear no reply from General Skywalker or anyone else, the commlink confirmed that coordinates had been submitted and received. 

“Please hurry,” He said softly, sinking to his knees next to Obi-Wan again, watching for any sign of movement.

It was them, only them, in the middle of the desert on a hostile planet. He didn’t want to, couldn’t let himself think of what they would do if there had been no working commlinks. And he wasn’t sure why he had such hope now that Skywalker would come. Nothing about the campaign had gone as it should have and no here they were, surrounded by dead men and perhaps dying themselves. Cody closed his eyes against the light filtering in and let his thoughts drift away from that line of thinking.

Instead, he found himself thinking of other campaigns that they had been on. Ryloth and Vanmir 5 and all of the other nameless, blurring places where he had been by Obi-Wan’s side. All the times that Obi-Wan had leaned on him for support, all the times that the General had offered Cody a smile or a cup of homebrewed caf in the command tent after a particularly difficult day. And he thought of them now, perhaps dying here together.

The thought didn’t bother him as much as he thought it might.

He had no desire to die now. Nor for the General, for Obi-Wan, to die either. It was why in the back of his mind he was listening for the whirring of speeders or ship engines to signal the arrival of help that he could go out and greet and who could make sure that Obi-Wan survived while Cody was powerless to do anything about it at the moment. But if he had to think of his death, dying side by side with his general, with Obi-Wan, seemed very right.

His eyes opened at the thought and he looked to Obi-Wan’s face. The odds of them dying together were quite high; in the current moment, they were extremely so. But if they walked out of this battlefield and onto the next one, the chance only continued to grow in its likelihood. And for Cody, a clone who had known for a long time that his life did not belong to him, that seemed the best ending. At least the one he would have preferred.

He had imagined himself, in the moments between waking and sleeping and in quiet moments when they were sharing a quiet meal or drink or discussion of battle plans, always at Obi-Wan’s side. He imagined calling him Obi-Wan to his face as he did often in his thoughts, as he often did in dreams that were painted with images of them in shared spirits: Joy or laughter or relaxation. Sometimes, in those dreams he didn’t allow himself when he was awake, he pictured Obi-Wan’s hand in his own, fingers laced together. Or the scratch of Obi-Wan’s beard against his face as they pressed close together in an almost kiss.

He never imagined that kiss coming to fruition. That was the point where the comfort he took in those thoughts tipped over into pain. Of longing. Of loss. He pushed it away.

“Skywalker’s coming,” Cody said, and watched for a reaction that he knew wasn’t coming. Even as he said it, he could hear the faint whine of ship engines approaching them. “I’ll be right back, Sir.”

He stood slowly, vision darkening around the edges as he did. “I’ll be right back,” He promised again, thoughts shifting now to the medical report he needed to give, to the medical care that he needed.

He walked to the part of the ship where what left of the door was shut tight and started to push, the ship outside now roaring. And as other soldiers came in to tag the numbers of the men who had been killed on board, and the medic team rushed Obi-Wan onto the ship, Cody went with him. And as he collapsed onto the medical bed next to him in the ship, vision going black and bright in alternating spots, he reached out a hand towards him, wishing only for a moment that he might wake up and reach back.


End file.
